]]>Comment on How Do I Find Direct Customers for My Translation Business? by Dmitry Kornyukhovhttps://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/how-do-i-find-direct-customers-for-my-translation-business/#comment-30765
Tue, 31 Mar 2015 15:47:48 +0000http://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/?p=11641#comment-30765Hey Alison,
In case of Gengo it’s mostly a crowd-sourcing platform and as we know such approach rarely results in high-quality translations. I wouldn’t apply the same rule to agencies, though. There are good agencies that care about the quality they deliver, offer good rates, and have nice-looking websites. Agencies and Gengo are two beasts of totally different nature.

]]>Comment on How Do I Find Direct Customers for My Translation Business? by Alison Penfoldhttps://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/how-do-i-find-direct-customers-for-my-translation-business/#comment-30763
Tue, 31 Mar 2015 15:37:34 +0000http://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/?p=11641#comment-30763“Fortunately, I simply like patents, although I am not quite sure why (there is probably something wrong with me).”

You actively *like* patents? Wow. I thought learning to tolerate them was enough. To be fair, there *are* some nice juicy patents out there (I’ve had some really nice metallurgy, chemical, papermaking and rubbermaking ones over the years, for example), but many of them can be a bit hard on the digestive system. I tend to prefer patent oppositions, myself.

]]>Comment on How Do I Find Direct Customers for My Translation Business? by Alison Penfoldhttps://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/how-do-i-find-direct-customers-for-my-translation-business/#comment-30762
Tue, 31 Mar 2015 15:31:53 +0000http://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/?p=11641#comment-30762“The most attractive designs are usually found on the websites of outfits whose main strength is marketing and who provide outrageous conditions for their translators (very low rates) resulting in horrible quality of the translations.

Gengo would be a good example of that.”

Thank you. I’d never heard of them, and had been about to ask you whether they were any good :-)
So, okay, in future I’ll know to think twice if any agency has a half-way decent-looking website!

]]>Comment on Direct Customers Will Make You a Better Translator by Alison Penfoldhttps://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/direct-customers-will-make-you-a-better-translator/#comment-30759
Tue, 31 Mar 2015 14:44:59 +0000http://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/?p=11665#comment-30759“I hope that translators will not fall for this new hoax the way they fell for the hoax of computer-assisted tools, which were sold to us as a way to increase our income, and then instead used to further reduce translators’ remuneration by forcing translators to accept reduced payment for “fuzzy matches” and no payment for “full matches”, which is nothing but a greedy and extremely dishonest scam.”

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this on this blog, but apologies if I’m repeating myself. Fortunately from this point of view, with the patents I translate, which are mainly ones under the European Patent Convention, these are usually what I refer to as “photocopy-PDF” ones, i.e. someone has printed them off, possibly written over them in what you hope is a legible hand, and then run them through a scanner just like a photocopier, rather than converting a Word document into a PDF. This makes it virtually impossible to process them with translation memory without doing a lot of preliminary work on the text, so the idea of being ripped off for fuzzy/full matches doesn’t tend to be a reality. I don’t know if that applies to Japanese too?

On the other hand, I can still cite the case of the regular customer who sent me 12 different patent applications as Word files, all with varying amounts of overlap. I whizzed through those in unusually short order with the TM, and did give them a significant discount in that case, BUT a) every word of them was translated by me, so I didn’t have to rely on cobbling together and unifying translations in different styles and potentially of varying quality done by different people, and b) there was no petty haggling over not paying for 100% matches and so on: I simply worked out how much actual translation work I’d done, how many hours it had taken to check the whole lot (no ignoring 100% matches here, thank you very much), and charged them based on that. Result: fair remuneration for the work I’d done, and a saving for the client.

]]>Comment on Who Or What Is “A Dear Linguist”? by mariebrotnovhttps://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/who-and-what-is-a-dear-linguist/#comment-30729
Mon, 30 Mar 2015 20:40:20 +0000http://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/?p=11680#comment-30729I got myself stuck in a “linguist” quagmire just recently when I referred to a poetry publisher as a “fellow linguist” and was immediately challenged by our mutual friend Richard on how, exactly I defined that term. I realized I was just using the word as a sort of lazy shorthand for “someone who does something involving language”. This might explain the use of this term by overworked large-agency PMs, although why they wouldn’t just use “translator” remains a mystery. Still, it’s a nice, easy tip-off you’re dealing with a mass e-mail. I hate it when you respond to an e-mail apparently addressed only to you, and then it still turns out they actually sent the e-mail to a lot of others and already gave it to the first responder. OR, and this is even more annoying, you respond the minute you get the offer, and an hour later they email you back saying they had just given it to someone else one second before you responded. No they didn’t, they waited around to see if they could get a lower rate from someone else. So hurray for obvious give-aways; it saves time :)

]]>Comment on Who Or What Is “A Dear Linguist”? by patenttranslatorhttps://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/who-and-what-is-a-dear-linguist/#comment-30701
Sun, 29 Mar 2015 22:05:16 +0000http://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/?p=11680#comment-30701OMG, LOL, THX, Anna.

All those acronyms, abbreviations, and newspeak slogans and propagandistic concepts like “integration of the latest language technology” and “cloud worker platform efficiencies” almost make me nostalgic for the old idiotic slogans of my youth, such as:

]]>Comment on Who Or What Is “A Dear Linguist”? by AnnaS.https://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/who-and-what-is-a-dear-linguist/#comment-30700
Sun, 29 Mar 2015 21:17:52 +0000http://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/?p=11680#comment-30700The font looks good now, although all text, everywhere, is getting smaller for my eyes, and I can’t blame any code for that… Good post. Someone should put together a dictionary of that half-literate New Agency-Speak (I refuse to call it English). In addition to “linguist” and the repulsive, stomach-turning “vendor” I was also recently called a “consultant” and asked if I could “take a case”, which was a 1 page routine translation. And then, we have those acronyms… SLA (Steve offered a nice explanation for that one elsewhere), NDA, TP, TED, TEP by EOD, and many others, that combined with the Facebook acronyms like ROFLMAO, IDK, TTYL et cetera make me wonder what planet I am living on. Od course, YMMV.

]]>Comment on Direct Customers Will Make You a Better Translator by Direct Customers Will Make You a Better Transla...https://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/direct-customers-will-make-you-a-better-translator/#comment-30690
Sun, 29 Mar 2015 13:49:39 +0000http://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/?p=11665#comment-30690[…] In my last silly post, I described how based on my own case and the experience of almost three decades, a translator can go about finding direct customers for a small translation business an… […]

]]>Comment on Making the Switch from Agency Clients to Direct Clients by Direct Customers Will Make You a Better Translator | Patenttranslator's Bloghttps://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/making-the-switch-from-agency-clients-to-direct-clients/#comment-30687
Sun, 29 Mar 2015 11:33:40 +0000http://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/?p=9147#comment-30687[…] An alternative model is based on working only with the traditional model of translation agency and, … […]